In one of our recent blogs, we talked about the books we’ve been reading that have enlightened us about the unconscious assumption that history equals white history and that white history holds the whole truth. Turns out that is so untrue, to find out the rest of the story can be mind and heart shattering. So how can any of us, or each of us, get by our feelings of overwhelming powerlessness regarding the violent instability of our identity as a nation? If the problem isn’t “them”—whether you identify them as our politicians or some other convenient scapegoat for the problems that divide our nation from itself—then what can you and I do to be part of the solution?

Start by educating yourself and demanding that the schools teach your children the whole truth too. Contrary to the urging of our forefathers, our nation has never put the studying of American history—the full and complete histories—at the center of our development as citizens, never mind as a requirement for politicians. If we as Americans could only begin to do so, as Germany is modeling for us, perhaps we would start correcting those ills of the past that are yet embedded in our customs, culture, and policies in far too many ways.

When you look into our “heritage,” ask whose heritage. Find out what the impact of that heritage was on white and non-white citizens alike. We can see this beginning as Ivy League schools, those bastions of white power, are now beginning to look into how they were built with wealth created by enslaving Black people and then further discriminated against Black workers, applicants, and students into the present. See these efforts at truth and reconciliation at Brown here, and at Harvard, Radcliffe, and elsewhere here. When we study any historical policy, practice, or custom, we must look at its effects on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on not just white people, men in particular, as is the current and historical custom, but on women and children and men of color as well, with the conditions in their historical and current reality upfront. We must ask what was the impact of the decades of the requirement of being a property owner to vote in this country on working class citizens and how their voices are heard or not heard today. We must ask how the prohibition of voting for women until 1920 has impacted women’s view of their interests, men’s view of women’s interests, and women’s interests per se in a still male-dominated government. We must look at what the differences in impact were for white people, Black people, and Native American people, whose traditions of a grandmothers’ council is widespread and equalizing. We must address how the ongoing obstacles to voting for Blacks and other minorities persist from enslavement times and create untold harm.

We need to keep looking at our history because so many of the conditions for discrimination that existed earlier continue today. Perhaps not to the same dramatic degree that found state governments paying for the scalps of Indian men, women, and children on a sliding scale, while creating a mythology of Indians scalping settlers; or of lynching Black men by the dozens in town squares and hunting parks for exercising behavior that white men would be free to do—argue, smile, speak, work—or of force-feeding women jailed for agitating for the right to vote on hunger strike, forcing women raped by their husbands to stay put, carry the baby to term, make his dinner. And so on. Nevertheless, historical and embedded discrimination in power, influence, affluence, liberty of movement, and forgiveness of mistakes, to name only some ramifications, continues to plague our nation in the twenty-first century.

We don’t need to learn these things because we are altruistic. Though supporting others’ rights is a good thing. No, this blindness of the impact of our whole history affects white men too. Blindly accepting blanket privilege and thinking you have it because you deserve it and others don’t have it because they probably don’t deserve it, results in a loss of humanity, because you are accepting a lie as true, a special case as normal, and the suffering caused to others as natural. When we persist in oppressing others by our insular perspective, when we sentimentalize our experience and dismiss the reality of others’, when we habitually choose war to assert our desire for power or wealth, calling it security, even over our own people’s protest, we diminish ourselves as human beings.

Is it our fluid and inconstant identity as a country that causes us to grab violence as the easy answer to the more complex question of who are we? Do the possibilities of what our history means and how our diversity might change us so disturb the national psyche, cause us so much anxiety, that we use violence, even the presentiment of war to soothe our pain? Does that explain our out-of-bounds gun violence, our gargantuan military, our sword rattling and drone launching around the world? Are we so stuck in our national cognitive dissonance that we prefer to be at war with ourselves, the rest of the world, and the future health of the planet itself, in total contradiction to the core values of live-and-let-live democracy, rather than face ourselves as we are and as we could be? You have to wonder.

On some level, our country’s character is greatly defined by the political party that’s in power at any given time. We are sometimes the country of corporate wealth and military might, law and order, and at others the country of tolerance and refuge, opportunity and self-determination. But because we veer from one identity to the other, the political ball is never advanced down the field where eventually all American people’s needs are adequately met. Instead, each party purports to try its best to establish a status quo in its pure ideological form. Unfortunately, this translates to a primary, perhaps the only goal of merely helping to maintain politicians’ efforts to stay in power.

This has been going on too long. And there are too many instances of government betraying its contracts and treaties with those who lived on this land; it’s so entrenched that many have concluded government is the problem. But no. We’re the problem, because we don’t know our history and we are complacent as long as we have our creature comforts. Instead, we let the parties divide us, so that they can represent their special interests rather than consider the people at every turn. This is how we are continuously involved in wars that we have no business being in, in the first place. And at least since the Vietnam War, these wars don’t even “provide” that unifying function for identity anymore; they just further divide us. Meanwhile, voices outside of those two major parties never get to be heard, even if ideas coming from them might hold the solutions to our disunification as a country and alienation from each other.

If this regressive, non-democratic, and self-serving behavior continues by both political parties, by the end of this century or before, our republic might continue in some authoritative form, but our democracy will become extinct. Not because of forces from without but because our politicians have chosen to avoid those hard questions about who we’ve been and who we are and who we might become if we actually operate by the blueprint of the Constitution and amend it where it has purposely or unwittingly kept some people out of the weave of freedom and others out of the weft of responsibility.

The truth is that our unifying identity is already woven in the warp and weft of our founding documents, which were in large part based on the structure of the Iroquois Confederation. We might consider as a nation bringing our Constitution even more in line with Native Peoples’ cultural balance of rights and responsibilities in order to strengthen and unify our identity as a free people who love the land we live upon. These might include stories and policies that encompass what we like to call the simple truths of life: integrity (at the individual and public level), compassion (which evolves from the empathy created by listening), and a commitment to each other’s well-being as much as to our own (other-centeredness or service). We’ll know these simple truths of life have become part of our institutions when they become our common lexicon, free of political meaning and innuendo.

H. John Lyke and Kathryn L. Robyn are the authors most recently of Political Straight Talk: A Prescription for Healing Our Broken System of Government (iUniverse 2016).